Category: memories

memories, nostalgia

Those summer nights

Mary Elyn Bahlert

As a child, it seemed to me that summer was long. And as a child, the summer was not only long – but languid. That’s a word I’d use for the particular sense of summer in that humid climate. Humidity ruled summertime, until the day that gave way to a spectacular lightening storm. And then the air shook and the sky was grey and the sound of another clap of thunder after the brilliant lightening eased the languid air.

Summer evenings, my family would gather on the front porch after supper. We always had supper, except for major holidays – Christmas, Easter – supper, not dinner, which is what Jeff and I have together each late afternoon now. I’ve taken to using the word supper, sometimes, to describe the late afternoon meal we share. Each time I use the word “supper,” I notice. Over the course of our marriage, we’ve always sat together at the table at dinner-time. And we do now, too.

But we had supper at five in my family as I grew up. We always had a home-cooked meal, except for those very special Fridays when Daddy would go to George Webb to pick up hamburgers – 7 hamburgers for $ .99.
Yes, that’s it: 99 cents. Sometimes we had borscht – always a favorite for me – and other times we’d have holubtsi, stuffed cabbage, as it is known in other cultures. A good search tells me that holubtsi translates to “little pigeons.” I suppose it takes some doing, some mind-shaping, to imagine the cabbage rolls as little pigeons. I did not favor holubtsi. And so, even though I have the recipe in my mother’s own hand, with personal notes describing her preferences – I have never made holubsti.

After supper, after the dishes were washed and dried and put away, we’d gather as a family on the front porch of our upstairs flat. At one flat, I remember leaning over the porch railing on the side next to the alley to see my Grandma Markowski (Srebny) coming slowly up the alley. There were always several foldable lawn chairs on the porch, and a chaise lounge that I came to enjoy as I entered my teen years. In the 1950’s, when both my parents were still smokers, Daddy nailed an empty coffee can to the railing to use as an ashtray. But after a winter of bad colds, both he and Mom stopped smoking, and at a time when the bad effects of cigarette smoking were becoming common knowledge.

Some evenings during the summer, Mom would head back into the house to the kitchen, and we’d have drippy slices of watermelon as a treat. When Suzie and I were little, Mom gave us each a slice of bread to eat with the watermelon, to assure we would not wet our beds because we’d had watermelon slices in the evening. Mom had a few “old wives tales” that she believed, maybe even into her elder years. And those beliefs are beliefs that I have never held.

Summer evenings were still humid – even languid – in the Midwest, until a thunderstorm gathered overhead and boomed us into the house. I remember lying in bed, listening to a storm go overhead from the west to the east; we lived only a few miles from the shore of Lake Michigan, where I expect the storms were gathered up and disappeared – other weather patterns formed across states to the east.

When Daddy had his two weeks of vacation from the steel mill each summer, we’d head up to Door County for one week of the two, staying with an aunt and uncle and cousins, or renting a modest cabin for the week. Kellstrom’s in Sister Bay had a cottage to the west of the highway, on a small rise, halfway up the road. I always look up that road when I pass it along Wisconsin Highway 42. The cottage has been gone for many years now. Those modest cabins have been replaced by 4 star hotels along the whole length of the village of Sister Bay.

But there has not been anything to replace those languid summer evenings in the Midwest, for me. When I arrived to live in the Bay Area in 1981, I was surprised that the East Bay’s summers were grey with fog in summertime, fog that didn’t clear until late afternoon. Along with those hot summers, which brought their own kind of living along with the short season in Wisconsin, the humidity that plagues the Midwest often is not present here along San Francisco Bay. And we have a lot more sun now in the summertime which makes me much happier than the long grey days the sunny days have replaced.

What I miss most about summer days in the Midwest – other than my family, so many who have passed now – is the preciousness of the season. When we knew that we’d be facing a long, gray winter, each day of summer, we knew to cherish the time. We cherished the time because we understood that it was short, and that soon enough, the seasons would bring gray skies and cold winds off Lake Michigan for months.

Suzie and me, circa 1955-1956, Milwaukee.

memories, remembering

My uncle Pete

Mary Elyn Bahlert

I guess some people would call Uncle Pete a “blowhard”. He did have a tendency to talk loudly in a room filled with people, and to lend his certain extraverted charm to that room.

Even so, Uncle Pete was a favorite of mine.

I watched him as my Uncle Johnny – the smart one, the sibling with the “interesting” past – spoke. Then, Uncle Pete was quiet and listened, with a certain reverence, to every word. I’m not sure how I learned the secret, but word was that Uncle Pete only rose to the rank of Sergeant First Class in the Army because of Uncle Johnny. As I write now, I can see the look in Uncle Pete’s eyes as he listened. He held Uncle Johnny, his eldest sibling, in the highest regard.

Uncle Pete was handsome. In my eyes, anyway, Uncle Pete was handsome. And Uncle Pete knew how to be an Uncle. That’s a difficult quality to explain. But Uncle Pete had it. When I was dating Jeff – who would go on to be my life partner, my husband, Uncle Pete quietly spoke to me one day: “I can see he’s showing more affection to you now.”

After I had moved to the Bay Area from Milwaukee, and after Jeff and I had moved around a fair amount, we lived in San Leandro. At the time, The Oak Knoll Navy Hospital operated in Oakland. My Aunt Athalie – Uncle Pete’s wife, the mother of their daughter, Michelle – was being operated on for the serious arthritis she suffered. I went to visit her, and when I arrived, Uncle Pete was there with her in the private room. He was quiet as she and I talked. After I’d been to seminary, I think some members of the family held me in some suspicion, and I count Uncle Pete among them. And so Uncle Pete – usually a boisterous presence in any room – stayed silent.

Still, after I’d visited with Aunt Athalie, as I left the room, Uncle Pete walked beside me to the elevator, then walked with me from the hospital to my car. He was quiet the whole way. He made sure I drove out of the parking lot safely before he returned to the hospital.

*

In 1995, I was sent by the Bishop to serve a small, half-time Church appointment in South San Francisco. I’ve always considered it a quirk of fate that the church to which I was sent was in a development of single family homes built in the hills of South San Francisco after World War 2. I say “quirk of fate” because the church had been built in the development where Uncle Pete and Aunt Athalie’s modest home stood. I can recite the address today. I’d known the address since I was a child, and had arrived at exactly the place where I’d arrived in my early teens; in a hot, humid Wisconsin summer, I’d taken an imagined trip from my family’s upper flat clear across the country to — Alta Mesa Drive, South San Francisco. The people of Aldersgate United Methodist Church (the church has since built a new building and changed its name), who made sure I had a nice lunch waiting for me every Sunday, would sometimes give me a meal to take over to Uncle Pete and Aunt Athalie.

My mother had never liked Aunt Athalie. I knew that, although I expect no words to that effect were ever spoken. And I think – again, these thoughts are my own – that my mother was jealous of Uncle Pete. Pete had been my grandmother’s youngest child and her favorite. My mother had grown up in a home filled with drinking and parties, their own kind of chaos. And while she loved her father, her relationship with her mother was more complicated. Maybe Mom had expected her mother to protect her from the abuse she suffered in her mother’s house. Still, the way these things happen, Mom was the one who carefully cared for my grandmother in her final years. But in my years getting to know Aunt Athalie, I came to love her. I miss her now.

When Uncle Pete developed Alzheimer’s, he would wander around the housing development. He might have been a nuisance, or worse, to other people. Instead, the men of the neighborhood, who knew Pete was a veteran, accepted and explained his wandering: “Pete fought in three wars,” they’d say. He was safe.

Aunt Athalie called me the day Uncle Pete turned violent – a symptom of Alzheimer’s – and asked for reassurance that if I called the police to help her, they would not take Uncle Pete to jail. I called the police local to the neighborhood and had their assurance. And so they came to take Uncle Pete to the hospital, and later a facility, where he would die.

And I have a fond memory of a visit Jeff, my mother, and I made to see Uncle Pete in the facility. He was safe there. His caregivers brought him into a small room where my mother, my cousin Michelle, her husband, Jeff, and I sat around a table. I don’t think Uncle Pete knew us at all, although he was loud and boisterous. When the visit was over, we walked outside together into the beautiful Bay Area day. As we walked away, my mother turned back. The rest of us waited as she stood again in front of her little brother, Pete, and as she gently reached up to touch his face.

“I can think of younger days, when living for my life was everything a man could want to do. I could never see tomorrow, for I was never told about the sorrow…” words and music by Barry and Robin Gibb, 1971

memories, Uncategorized

Driving Through Chester

Mary Elyn Bahlert

Rainier was going with Lia, a young woman who lived in the same apartment that they rented together with several other young women in San Francisco. At just the right time, Rainier and Lia started dating each other – and that was it. They were a couple. It was 2012.

Rainier lived with us in Oakland for the first few years of his studies at San Francisco State University, before he’d moved out to live in the City during his last year of school. He’d come to live with us almost from the day he’d graduated from High School on Oahu, calling to ask us whether the offer of a home with us we’d made some years before was for real. It was for real, and we were glad to have him. He lived in a small porch-like area with windows on two sides in a second story duplex before we moved into the beautiful Craftsman Style home we’ve owned and lived in since. In our home, Rainier’s space was down several steps from the kitchen, a small room with a low ceiling and access through sliding doors to the garden. During the move to our new house, he’d offered a strong helping hand. He’d joined us as we gathered a few friends to our new home for a house blessing.

While he was in college, Rainier had taken up bicycling, first using a second hand bike he’d found in the basement of the duplex on Sunnyslope Avenue, graduating to another bike and into a group of cyclists in San Francisco, competing for Mike’s Bikes by traveling to races. Now he’s got a stash of bicycles and parts in his workshop in the yard of his home in Seattle.

When the time to go out on his own came, Rainier moved to San Francisco, where he shared part of an old house with several young women.

We knew from the start that Lia was Rainier’s true partner, and we have enjoyed their company together ever since. Jeff officiated at their wedding. During COVID, we’d made the trip from our place in Oakland to their home in Seattle several times to spend time with them and their baby girl Celeste, born on the first day of COVID sheltering in place – March 17, 2020. Rainier and Lia and Celeste became the children of our own we did not have.

*

After they became a couple, we invited Rainier and Lia to join us at our friends’ Paul and Lana’s place in the Warner Valley, 5 hours north of the Bay Area, for a few days. The four of us had fun together: we watched the budding romance. When our visit was over, we packed up Jeff’s Forester and headed back to the Bay Area. We stopped in Chester, at the southern end of the Valley, dropped off a few days’ worth of garbage in a big garbage can in a driveway, and started West out of Chester toward Highway 5. We left the town limits of Chester. Jeff noticed first. He didn’t say anything to us, but he watched a police vehicle driving along behind us. Jeff is not one to speed, but he watched the speedometer anyway.

Just as we left the town limits, the red lights of the squad car went on and we pulled over. The four of us sat silent in the car as the officer came to the window and asked to see Jeff’s license. I’m sure the officer could read the faces of anyone he pulled over, because that day, he took his time to explain that we’d been seen dumping garbage in town. “I’ll give you a choice,” he said. “You can go back and get that bag of garbage, or I can take you jail.”

“We’ll go back to pick the garbage up,” Jeff said.

We were silent as Jeff turned the car around and watched as he didn’t go a bit over the speed limit as we returned to Chester. We found the garbage container where we’d deposited our garbage less than an hour before. Jeff stopped the car. Rainier got out to get the bag of garbage. We were silent, but I’ll bet we were watched by the neighbors who’d – apparently – watched us before.

And we were mostly silent on the long ride back to San Francisco.

When we drove into San Francisco, I’d taken the wheel, and we were almost at Rainier and Lia’s place. At the same moment, we all burst into laughter, unable to contain it any longer. We all burst into the laughter that followed our entanglement with the Law in Chester.

And you can bet we’ve told that story to one another many times since that fateful day…

A view of Warner Valley now, Mt. Shasta in the distance. After fires several years ago, damaged trees stand amid trees that had escaped the fire. Paul and Lana’s first cabin was destroyed in the fire; the homes on either side of the cabin that burned still stand. Photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 6/9/26.

memories, nostalgia, remembering

Auntie Irene

Mary Elyn Bahlert

Suzie called her “the hugger.” Yes, Auntie Irene – one of the extroverted Bahlert’s – loved to hug us when we arrived at her house on Old Lime Kiln Road in Baileys Harbor, Wisconsin. And she loved to hug us when we left. She was, indeed, “the hugger.” Like my dad, Frank Bahlert, Auntie Irene talked fast and kept on talking, no matter what. And she would cry sometimes, too. Her emotions came easily to her, and they couldn’t be kept quiet. It wasn’t quiet with Auntie Irene around.

When Dad had his two weeks off from the steel mill each summer, we’d drive up to Door County – 200 miles north of Milwaukee, a peninsula bordered by Lake Michigan on the East and Green Bay on the West – and spend a week.

Sometimes we stayed in a rented cabin, rented from the Kellstrom’s of Sister Bay, and sometimes we’d stay with my Uncle Fritz, Aunt Goldie, Bobbie and Susie. For several years, they lived on a farm East of Sister Bay, where they kept pigs. After a long day at the shipyards in Sturgeon Bay, Uncle Fritz, my Dad’s younger brother, would collect garbage from restaurants along the highway to feed the pigs. The fastest I ever rode in a vehicle – a small truck – was with Uncle Fritz. My cousin Bobbie in the middle, me on the passenger side, and Uncle Fritz at the wheel, he sped up to 100 miles per hour. I think I was too young to consider what could have happened at that speed – and without seatbelts. Uncle Fritz was one of the quiet Bahlert’s, like my Auntie Edna, Uncle Clarence, Uncle Ray, and my cousin Terry, Ray’s daughter.

Auntie Irene, like my Dad, was a talker – as well as a hugger. After college and after I had been hired as a Claims Representative in the Social Security Office in Green Bay, Wisconsin, I’d sometimes stay the weekend with Auntie Irene and Uncle Erdreich – others called him “Peggy.” They had an upstairs to their house, an upstairs reached by a narrow stairway built into the wall. I’d stay alone in one of the two rooms up that narrow passage, looking up from my bed at the trees that pressed against the windows as the wind blew. Food was always plentiful at Irene and Erdreich’s house. Auntie Irene would bring out dish after dish of good food, filling the table with her cooking along with her non-stop talking.

I liked to introduce friends to my family in Door County. Friends were always welcome. One day, I invited a friend who worked with me at the Social Security Office in Green Bay. We headed to Door County on Friday night. After we’d met Auntie Irene and Uncle Erdreich, Becky and I headed out for some adventure of our own. Becky surprised me as we pulled out of the driveway and onto the highway: “there’s no excuse for someone to be like that,” she said. My feelings about Auntie Irene did not change with her comment, but my feelings about Becky did. I had no excuse to be a friend of someone who judged these loving, kind folks so harshly.

Another friend traveled with me from California to Wisconsin, many years later. We, too, made the pilgrimage to Door County. In her way, Bonnie told me, “I’ve never met people like this before.” Together with my mother, Bonnie and I climbed the narrow steps to that simple upstairs room and stayed the night. We were recipients of a kind and gentle hospitality.

When I took my husband Jeff up to meet the Door County folks for the first time, his kind and open manner made him welcome from the start. He loved to meet the family I loved so dearly, and they welcomed him with kindness. Jeff gets excited about a lot of things – which is fun (but can be exhausting). Together with Auntie Edna and Uncle Werner, Auntie Irene and Uncle Erdreich, we went to take a look at the cabin that Werner used to house seasonal workers who came from the city to pick cherries every summer in his orchard. We walked through tall grass to the frame house, following one another on a narrow path. As we approached the house, Jeff was saying: “this is great! “

Behind me as we walked along the narrow path to the house, I heard Auntie Irene say, under her breath: “I feel sorry for Mary Elyn.” I can still hear her voice, saying out loud only to herself what she was really thinking…

I was hospitalized in the summer of 1996. Before Jeff and I had made the trip back to Wisconsin, I’d written a note to my beloved Auntie Irene, who was ill and in a care home. “Wait for me,” I’d written. When Jeff and I and my mother made it to Door County, Irene had already passed. I sat with the others in the narrow wooden pews of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. After the funeral, I stood on the steps of the church, looking over the heads of my Bahlert cousins, some of whom I had not seen for many years. I remembered what I’d written in my note to Auntie Irene. Auntie Irene had waited. And I had returned, just in time, as it turned out.

Irene Bahlert, circa 1923

memories, remembering, Uncategorized

“There are places I’ll remember all my life, though some have changed…”

Mary Elyn Bahlert

I could say that Sue and Bill have changed. Sue passed in 2003, and Bill passed in 2024. For many years, Sue and I had been the best of friends.

I met Sue in December of 1978. At the time, I was a Claims Representative in the Social Security Office on the South Side of Milwaukee. My supervisor, Larry Alt, had told me that I should meet his wife. He thought we could be friends. When I arrived at the Social Security Office on Fond du Lac Avenue on Milwaukee’s North Side to help adjudicate a back load of SSI claims, I managed to scout out Sue, hard at work at her desk. One day, after the rest of the office had gone home and both Sue and I were working on claims at our desks, I sat down across from Sue. She and I started a conversation that day; in my mind, that conversation was the beginning of one long conversation that ended with Sue’s death in 2004.

When Sue and Larry moved to the Chicago Area a few years later, Sue would come up to spend a weekend with me from time to time. Those weekends had a familiar routine. From the moment she sat down in my living room in the red velvet chair that faced the couch on Friday night until she left early on Sunday afternoon, we talked and talked. At the time, Sue was a smoker, and I’d sit across from her as she lit cigarette after cigarette, the smoke rising in the room along with our laughter. When the evening had come, we’d go to dinner at some good restaurant and sit there, too, talking and talking some more. On Saturday, Sue would sleep in, and I’d rise early to do some weekend cleaning in the apartment until Sue was up. And then – the conversation continued. Sometimes we’d teach one another a new makeup trick, or try on one another’s clothes.

All dolled up again in the evening, we’d find another good restaurant where we’d have dinner and talk – and talk.

I think Sue was surprised when I decided to go to seminary, and left Milwaukee in late December of 1981 to move to Berkeley. But her surprise and my move didn’t matter; the conversation continued. I listened to the details of her life as she divorced Larry and as she moved up in positions in the Federal Government, eventually becoming District Manager of Social Security Office. That position suited her political instincts and her intellect – and her ambition. As I sat down to write about her now, I googled her name and discovered other local community positions she held when she later moved to Milwaukee to be head of staff in a large District Office.

A few years later, after she had dated many men in the years following her divorce from Larry, she met Bill. I knew something was different about Bill from the way Sue talked about him. She had a lift in her soft voice with its Southern nuances. And I was right. A couple of years later, they were married. I flew from the Bay Area of California to Midway Airport in Chicago, where Bill picked me up to drive me to where I’d stay for the weekend. I had the honor of officiating their wedding ceremony. On our ride through the city, I remember Bill saying: “I’m standing on solid ground.”

Indeed. Sue was finally happy. Bill was happy. Together, they formed a large blended family.

On Friday, February 6, 2004, I received a message on my answering machine from Sue’s mother. She happily relayed the news that Sue was in recovery from surgery, and that she had done well. I was surprised. I had not known about a surgery. Later that day, I received news that Sue had died. I don’t remember who relayed the news of this second announcement.

That spring, I returned to Milwaukee to take part in a Memorial Service for Sue. Bill had taken care of the details. I led the service, delivered a eulogy. Her daughter Meredith said a few words. Then, the room opened to the people who were there to remember and honor Sue, her life and achievements. I sat and listened for a long time. When the service had ended, Larry Alt came up to me in the narthex of the church. Larry said, “Sue would have liked this.” I hope he was right.

*

A couple of years after Sue’s death, Jeff and I were staying with Randy and Michael in their home in Pewaukee. Bill took the opportunity to see me again. As he and I sat together at the kitchen table, looking over the beautiful yard, Bill turned to me and said, “I have to get on with my life, Mary Elyn.” I looked into his eyes: “I know you do, Bill,” I answered. Later, a friend suggested that Bill’s announcement to me had been important to him.

From time to time, I saw pictures of Bill in his new life with a new wife – also Sue – in Florida. My warmth for Bill remained. I had hoped to see him again. One day in 2024, he left a message for me on Facebook. “I’d like to see you again, Mary Elyn,” he wrote. “I’d like to see you again, too, Bill,” I answered. My reunion with Bill did not happen; Bill passed in December of 2024. Meredith, Larry and Sue’s older daughter, left a message for me on Facebook.

“There are places I remember
All my life, though some have changed,
Some forever, not for better
Some have gone and some remain.

All these places had their moments
With lovers and friends, I still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
In my life, I’ve loved them all…” words and music, John Lennon and Paul McCartney

“All these places have their moments, with lovers and friends I still can recall…” photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, Mountain View Cemetery, Oakland, 2026.